Brute forcing my way into 100 users and 1 customer
BUILD STORY
Getting initial users for a SaaS product is so hard. Even if your product provides tons of value, if you can't get people to try it out it's worthless.
This is a short story of how I brute force my way into my first 100 users on a freemium model for AI Flow Chat, and if you're doing a freemium model, you can certainly do it too.
Initial Build
AI Flow Chat (aiflowchat.com) has a free tier and a paid tier. Many indies will tell you not to do a free tier, and to a certain extend I agree. If you're clear what value your product provide and you know that it provides value (through competition or similar products), kill your free plan.
For AI Flow Chat that is not the case. It's a AI workflow tool, and it potentially have many different use-cases. So I needed a free tier.
I built the MVP in 2 weeks. It was a simple product in the beginning. You could chain your prompts like ChatGPT and get questions answered and built on top of those answers.
Launch
I turned to Twitter/X.
I started posting random things and replied to random posts until I learned the ropes. With only 100 followers at that time, it was really depressing. I'm not from SF. None of my friends use Twitter. So growing was really hard.. Until it clicked!
Here's how you get users from Twitter: Post videos or screenshots of the output of your product. People don't want to see your UI for how to do work. They want to see the end result. Chances are if you are solving a problem, people with the same problem might be interested in a solution.
If someone showed interest, I would DM them and ask for feedback. I'd ask for brutal feedback. And I'd work fast. Same day delivery on feature requests and bug fixes.
During this grind, I got 10-20 users. It felt good. But it was somewhat of a vanity metric. Why? Because they did not come back to use the product a second time.
LAUNCH AGAIN!
I discovered this secret platform that will net you users for free. Reddit.com. Reddit is seriously a gold mine. Even if a post has 0 upvotes, you can still get 1-2K views. Even if you have a shit conversion rate (0.1%) you'd still get 1-2 users per bad post.
I'd spend everyday making at least one Reddit post for 2 weeks. The key strategy on reddit is to deliver a solution to a problem. Make it easy digestable. And most importantly, find the right subreddit. Some subs are horrible. But some are really good. You have to experiment.
Reddit compounds. After perhaps 6 posts, I had one perform well. And the thing is, one some subreddits, it will stay visible for weeks.
Reddit netted me around 70-80 users.
CONVERT
Boom. I had 100 free users. Time to convert. You have their attention. Now you have to figure out how to get their wallet. I'll explain in next story (hitting max char limit)
